Terres Inconnues: Cartographies of aLandscape to Be Invented*

ANTHONY VIDLER

OCTOBER 115, Winter 2006, pp. 13–30. © 2006 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The radical refusal of official urbanism and architecture in the polemics ofthe Lettrists and Situationists, together with the direct opposition to figures likeLe Corbusier and Paul Chombart de Lauwe evinced by Guy Debord, Asger Jorn,and Raoul Vaneigem, among others, has obscured the extent to which their callfor a new architecture and a “unitary” urbanism relied deeply on the professionalapproaches to which it was nonetheless opposed. This was so, not only in theambiguous stance of Jorn to the work of Le Corbusier, and the architecturalpropositions of Constant, themselves springing from the critique of CIAM ortho-doxy by Team X architects such as Aldo van Eyck, but also in the ways in whichDebord and his colleagues analyzed the problem of urbanism in itself, drawing on

* With apologies to Patrick Straram. This essay has grown out of my work on the role of aerialphotography in shaping the modernist urban imaginary, which was published as “Photourbanism:Planning the City from Above and from Below,” in Gary Bridges and Sophie Watson, eds., A Companionto the City (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2000), pp. 35–46, and later elaborated at a conference at theMaison Française at New York University organized by Denis Hollier. I thank the participants at thatconference, and Denis Hollier in particular, for their responses. 1. Guy Debord, Panegyric, Volumes 1 and 2, trans. James Brook and John McHale (London: Verso,2004), p. 167.

But I must here, once and for all, inform youthat all this will be more exactly delineatedand explained in a map, now in the hands ofthe engraver . . . not to swell the work . . . but byway of commentary, scholium, illustration,and key to such passages, incidents, or innu-endoes as shall be thought to be either ofprivate interpretation, or of dark and doubt-ful meaning after my life and my opinionsshall have been read over (no don’t forget themeaning of the word) by all the world. . . .

—Guy Debord, quoting Sterne’s The Lifeand Opinions of Tristram Shandy1

cartographic and photographic techniques, and even the “evidence” put forward byplanners themselves. On the one hand, this was the result of the entirely self-conscious strategy of détournement, of using the enemy’s material against itself; but onthe other hand, it also represented a kind of collusion based on a mix of nostalgia forthe original aims of a modern urbanism—for what avant-garde urbanist did notdream of a unitary solution?—and a historical sense that alternative traditions,rooted in the seventeenth-century conflict between Cartesians and Pascalians, hadbeen suppressed. For Debord, in particular, the maps, ideal and real, that traced thesettlement of the earth, and the aerial photographs that viewed these settlements inall their three-dimensional complexity, were charged with more than their officialorigin. From the outset they acted as objects of memory, reflection, and strategicplans. In the following essay, I trace only a few of the themes that linked Debord’sthought to that of cartographic representation—representation that, in its faithful-ness to the real somehow escaped the label of the spectacular, and that might stillwork as a ground for the reconstruction of the real.2

Geography

First there was a geography lesson. Debord’s “Valeur Éducative,” published inthree parts in Potlatch nos. 16–18,3 carefully selected phrases and paragraphs from hisbeloved grade-school textbook Géographie générale : Classe de 6ème by AlbertDemangeon and André Meynier.4 Mingling these excerpts with other fragments oftext taken from the Book of Psalms, Jeremiah, and Samuel, from Bossuet, Saint-Just,Marx, Engels, and from the November 5, 1954, edition of France-soir, the series waspresented as a mock radio emission delivered in four voices, the second one of whichis noted as jeune fille. Debord states that this émission radiophonique is published “with-out mention of the tones and sound effects that can only pass over the airwaves,” infavor of the words themselves. In apparently random order, the voices speak of theneed for rain, the story of Tamar and Ammon, Marx’s theory of the bourgeois family,the theory of intellectual and material production, the Algerian and Vietnamese con-flicts, prehistoric carnivores, and the scandal of the Queen of England purchasingfrom Dior. Interspersed among these excerpts are twelve fragments from Géographiegénérale that describe the weather, the lifestyles of peoples in warm and cold climates,

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2. For a summary treatment of this subject, see Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 82–90. For an analysis of Situationist mapping techniques, see TomMcDonough, “Situationist Space,” in McDonough, ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Textsand Documents (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 241–65, which also treats the geographicaldiscourse current in the 1950s, and more recently, McDonough, “Delirious Paris: Mapping as aParanoiac-Critical Activity,” Grey Room 19 (Spring 2005), pp. 6–21. 3. Guy Debord, “La valeur éducative,” in three parts, Potlatch nos. 16 ( January 26, 1955), 17(February 24, 1955), and 18 (March 23, 1955); republished in Potlatch 1954–1957 (Paris: Éditions Allia,1996), pp. 64–65, 71–72, 76–77. 4. Albert Demangeon and André Meynier, Géographie générale : Classe de 6ème (Paris: Hachette, 1937).This text was authored by Meynier in the series “Nouveau Cours de Géographie,” edited by Demangeon.

5. “Définitions,” Internationale Situationiste 1 (June 1958), p. 13.6. Boris Donné has pointed to the connection between the formula “détournement de mineur” andthe amorous liaisons in Debord’s circle commemorated in the pages of Mémoires. See Donné, (PourMémoires) Un essai d’élucidation des Mémoires de Guy Debord (Paris: Éditions Allia, 2004), p. 92. I am deeplyindebted to this meticulous study of the origins and contexts of the fragments of text in Mémoires for theclues that I have followed in this essay. Mémoires was published for private distribution by Guy Debord withpainted “supports” by Asger Jorn in 1959. See Guy Debord, Mémoires: Structures portantes d’Asger Jorn (Paris:Belles-Lettres Pauvert, 1994).

the dwellings of man, and the exploration of thepolar ice caps. The result is a political-geographi-cal collage that anticipates many of the détourements(the word used by Debord to describe theseextracts) later employed in the journal of the SI.

The common understanding of détourne-ment, as defined by Debord in the first issue of thejournal IS, was an “abbreviation” of the formula-tion “détournement of prefabricated aestheticelements,” or, more precisely, “the integration ofpresent or past products of the arts into a superiorconstruction of the milieu,” in the sense that“there could be no Situationist painting or music,but only the Situationist use of these means.” Morefundamentally, the definition went on, “détourne-ment at the interior of ancient/traditional culturalspheres is a method of propaganda, which bearswitness to the erosion and loss of importance ofthese spheres.”5 Literally “diversion, diverting,turning aside,” the juridical meaning of the worddétournement suggested embezzlement, and misap-propriation of funds, and it is clear that Debord

understood the procedure in both senses: not simply quoting, not simply borrowing,but through appropriation and recontexualization making new meaning out of oldproductions. In this sense, his citation of Demangeon and Meynier, in the context ofa fictive radio broadcast, would have a doubly diversionary effect—the détournementboth of the form of the broadcast and of its contents, themselves juxtaposed to con-struct a new “milieu.” Thus the essentially didactic form of the official broadcast istaken seriously in order to construe both an ironic critique of the form, as well as topropose a new didactic message; while the message, delivered in apparently benignmaxims and knowledge bites, is in fact constructed to undermine the schoolbookplatitudes. On another level, given the direct association of détournement with thejuridical charge “détournement de mineur,” or “abduction of a minor,” the insertionof “Voice 2,” the young girl, adds to the force of the piece as it seeks to overturn thetraditional “educational value” of the lesson and construct a new milieu that wouldkidnap the young and induct them into the new generation of proto-Lettrists.6

Cartographies of a Landscape to Be Invented 15

Albert Demangeon and AndréMeynier. Géographiegénérale (cover). 1946.

There is however, another sense in which Debord understood his rapaciousappropriations, as he indicated much later in a note to potential translators of hisPanégyrique 2 :

Each time—and there are frequent instances of this—that a word orsentence presents two possible meanings, both of them must be recog-nized and retained, for the sentence must be understood as whollyveracious with regard to both meanings. This also implies that the soletruth running through the entire text is the sum total of the possiblemeanings to be found therein.7

Thus, while all citations should first be understood as construed against their orig-inal meanings, directly or ironically, the very ambiguity of irony also has to beretained: “the reader should also be aware of the fact that he is not apprehendingmerely irony here: in the final analysis, should they be perceived as truly ironic?The doubt surrounding this question should remain intact.”8 Here the dialectic ofdétournement is clarified as a double identification: with the original and with itstransformed state, which are both retained in the resulting milieu that conservesall possible past and future implications of the détourned work.

In the case of the text of Géographie générale, as in many other works continu-ously referred to or excerpted in Debord’s writings, we can detect not too farbeneath the ironic surface a deep affection, if not nostalgia, not only for a moreinnocent past, but also for the apparently stable and heroic nature of the past inits mythic dimension. The Demangeon and Meynier textbook is divided into twosections, “Physical Geography,” which treats the geology, climate, and hydrogra-phy of the globe, and “Life on the Surface of the Globe,” with sections on animaland vegetal life, human life in hot, dry, and cold regions, habitations, towns,transports, exploration.

Debord’s selections begin with a statement on the weather and its necessity forour existence, which is brutally interrupted by Voice 2 (jeune fille) calmly telling theterrible story of Tamar’s rape by Ammon. In the same way, an extract from France-soirdescribing the “confidence” of the Algerian population in the police after the arrestof 178 terrorists is followed by Voice 2, in evident analogy, reading from Géographiegénérale about the “placid bovines [who] would be at the mercy of carnivores if itwere not for the pair of horns to defend themselves with.”9 Further citations onAlgeria (on the deployment of parachutists and the local army) are interspersedwith the racial commonplaces of Demangeon and Meynier, on the character of pop-ulations in tropical regions, notably the Pacific Islanders: “Fruits and flowers growin profusion, and amidst this splendid nature, the natives abandon themselves to liveidly.”10 Voice 1 reads on: “They love games, songs, dances, and receive strangers with

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7. Debord, Panegyric, p. 172. 8. Ibid.9. Debord, “La valeur éducative,” pp. 64–65.10. Potlatch 17, p. 71, from Demangeon and Meynier, p. 134.

a generous hospitality. But they are also strong and remarkable sailors.”11 Then, Voice3 cuts in with the empty assertion, “We have the situation well in hand” from a state-ment by the Governor General of Algeria. The last third of the broadcast is almostentirely taken up with fragments of the Géographie générale, about natural and man-made habitats, the exploration of the globe, especially the poles, and the glory ofhuman industry and conquest. The young girl at first responds with religious dedi-cation—“even when I walk in the valley of the shadow of death . . . ”—but she endsthe emission on a Marxist note, with another citation from Géographie générale :

In our own time, work takes place above all in the big factories wheremachines permit the fabrication of innumerable objects. The workeroversees and regulates the machines; he confines himself in a uniformand strictly defined work. The operation of such factories demandsenormous capital, a source of energy, an abundant labor force, and theproximity of suitable communication routes.12

From the principles of climatology, Debord has gradually worked his way, withironic reversals and shock juxtapositions, to a geography of the present that isdominated by industrial production, and colonial force sustained by racial preju-dice, but that is also the heir to heroic feats of discovery—the search for theNorthwest Passage is especially redolent for Debord—and natural ways of life thatmight counter modern capitalism.

Cartography

If Demangeon and Meynier provide the text for articles in Potlatch, and laterin the montages of Mémoires, as Boris Donné has shown, the geography textbookalso sets out what will become the foundations of a developed, dérive-driven psy-chogeography: first in its explication of the forms and functions of cartography,and second in its consideration of cities, always, of course, in the mode ofdétournement. Indeed the first chapter might be read as a precise counterpoint tothe theory of the dérive, as, under the title “Orientation,” it sets out the coordi-nates of the cardinal points, and explains how they can be recognized through theposition of the sun and stars, and their importance in navigation: “A traveler whocrosses a vast forest, a sailor in the middle of the ocean, an aviator who flies overthe desert, does not move according to chance, but knows exactly in what direc-tion they move.”13 The dérive, by contrast, will be a product, not of concentration,but of “distraction,” a “technique of displacement without any aim.”14 Chapter 4 ofthe Géographie générale, “Maps,” goes further: “In walking, you have lost your way.

Cartographies of a Landscape to Be Invented 17

11. Ibid.12. Potlatch 18, p. 77, from Demangeon and Meynier, Géographie générale, p. 170.13. Demangeon and Meynier, Géographie générale, p. 1.14. Guy Debord and Jacques Fillon, “Résumé 1954,” Potlatch 14 (November 30, 1954), p. 53.

You arrive at a crossroads without a sign. You are much embarrassed; but a passerbycarries a map in his pocket and points you in the right direction.”15 In less than tenpages, Meynier describes the principles of mapping a territory, from the very local tothe global, using detailed comparisons between aerial photograpic images taken atoblique angles—and geometrical plans. Thus an aerial view of Villeneuve-Saint-Georges is contrasted with a survey map of the same area; where the photograph“taken at low height allows one to see all the details: number of houses, trees, rail-roads, roofs, and limits of properties,” the map allows scale to be measured, but showsonly a few details.16 Four maps of the same region at different scales are then com-pared in terms of the level of detail and contours. In this comparative method webegin to see the germ of Debord’s cartographic imagination—one that moves fromaerial photographs to ideal maps, to his own constructions, with all the rigor of a pre-cise détournement, one that preserves the fundamental roles of photographs and mapsas guides, but now offers a “way” that has not been mapped before.

In the chapter on “Towns,” mapping is taken further as a mode of register-ing the historical growth of settlements from village to city, contrasting those“created at one time and designed by an architect on a checkerboard plan” andthose that have grown slowly with “their streets juxtaposed in disorder.”17 Hereaerial photographs compare New York, with its perpendicular intersections, andToulouse, with its concentric roads. Such views will, of course, become a favoriteway of describing the sites of “unitary urbanism” in the journal IS.

While Donné has traced even more citations from the Géographie généralethat were cut out and pasted into Debord’s Mémoires in 1956–57—he has notedsome ten fragments, including those that relate to the “grandes convulsions” of

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15. Demangeon and Meynier, Géographie générale, p. 21.16. Ibid., p. 22.17. Ibid., p. 202.

Demangeon and Meynier.Géographie générale (p.

3: “Orientation”). 1946.

Cartographies of a Landscape to Be Invented 19

Above: Demangeon and Meynier. Géographie générale (pp.22–23: Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, aerial view and plan).1946. Left: Demangeon and Meynier. Géographie générale(p. 42: volcanoes and earthquakes). 1946. Below: GuyDebord, Mémoires (Detail of p. 19: “Volcano”). 1959.

the earth and the Northwest Passage—it is in an apparently gratuitous phraseattached to the seventh (unmarked) page of Mémoires that we find the first connec-tion between this art of mapping and the psychological sources of its content. Thetext appears in the midst of a series of pages dedicated to “June 1952” and to thememory of his involvement with Barbara Rosenthal. It reads: “In this monstrousand derisory Carte du Tendre [sic] is the search for a person presented through hersuccessive existences.”18 This text, as Donné has revealed, is taken from a review byPhilippe Demonsablon of Max Ophuls’s film Lola Montès, which was the object offierce critical debate following its first screening in 1955. Donné finds its use byDebord to refer to the problematic nature of narrative—in film or in memoirs—ashe looks back on his own scandalous screening of Hurlements en faveur de Sade inJune 1952, where Barbara’s voice was that of the jeune fille.19 The fragment fromDemonsablon’s review, juxtaposed to the passionate evocations of “Barbara” on thesame page, also implies a parallel between the picaresque amours of Lola andthose of the real Barbara, as a young student at the Sorbonne, who is said to have“a smiling face, with that air of youth that seemed only to hold the promise of play,”but which is countered by “her terrible, magnificent, and desperate disorder,” onecompounded by her American roots, where “all the elements of an Americancrime novel were to be found, violence, sexuality, cruelty.”20

Beyond this, though, Demonsablon’s comparison of Lola Montès to the seven-teenth-century Carte de Tendre int imates another and more fundamentalinspiration for psychogeographic mapping. The movie, Ophuls’s last, was a big-budget production, in full CinemaScope, running 140 minutes and starringMartine Carol (already celebrated for her depiction of Lucretia Borgia) as Lola,“the queen of scandal.” The audience reaction was immediate: it resisted Ophuls’suse of flashbacks, camera movements, and an apparently rambling narrative withmass walkouts. Critical appreciation was less harsh, and it recognized the innova-tive structure and techniques of this film that attempted to portray the passions ofa once strong woman, in her own voice and through her own memories, as a cir-cus spectacle, as she is subjected to the mental whip of her owner-lover, PeterUstinov. It is easy, in retrospect, to see how Debord would have identified with amovie whose reception paralleled his own, and the plot seemed to map in visualterms what the opening voice-over called a story of passion and tenderness.

Indeed, a year later the connection was taken up literally, in Debord’sunsigned review of “Unitary Urbanism at the End of the Fifties,” published in thethird issue of the Internationale Situationiste. Here, set beside an aerial view of thecenter of Amsterdam, was a reproduction of the real Carte de Tendre of 1654,engraved for Madeleine de Scudéry as an illustration for the first volume of her

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18. Guy Debord, Mémoires (1958; Paris: Imprimerie du Lion, 1993), p. 7.19. Philippe Demonsablon, “Les Questions,” Cahiers du Cinéma 55 (January 1956), p. 31. For a com-mentary on Debord’s use of this special issue devoted to the criticism of Lola Montès, including extractstaken from François Truffaut’s review of the film, see Donné, (Pour Mémoires), pp. 50–51. 20. Debord, Mémoires, p. 7.

novel Clélie: Histoire Romaine published that same year.21 Joan DeJean has shownhow this “map” became the symbol of the new power of women in the post-Francesalons, as it depicted what de Scudéry proposed as a code of friendship as a spa-tialized domain.22 In the novel Clélie distinguishes among differing levels offriendship: half-friends, new friends, habitual friends, firm friends, special friends,and tender friends.23 These last, the tendres amis, were very few and could onlyattain this status with great difficulty. When asked by her suitor-friend Herminiushow far it was from “New Friend” to “Tender Friend,” the discussion suddenlytakes on the guise of a mapping seminar. Another friend, Aronce, declares that

Cartographies of a Landscape to Be Invented 21

21. Internationale Situationniste 3 (December 1959), p. 14; reproduction of François Chauveau,“Carte de Tendre,” in Madeleine de Scudéry, Clélie: Histoire Romaine, 6 vols. (Paris: Augustin Courbé,1654–1660), vol. 1. For a discussion of the original Carte de Tendre, misdated in the IS (“Carte du pays deTendre,” 1656), see Joan DeJean, “No Man’s Land: The Novel’s First Geography,” Yale French Studies 73(1987), pp. 175–89; Claude Filteau, “Le Pays de Tendre: l’enjeu d’une carte,” Littérature 36 (1979), pp.37–60; Jeffrey Peters, Mapping Discord: Allegorical Cartography in Early Modern French Writing (Newark,Del.: University of Delaware Press, 2004). 22. See DeJean, “No Man’s Land,” and “1654: The Salons, ‘Preciosity,’ and the Sphere of Women’sInfluence,” in Denis Hollier, ed., A New History of French Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1989), pp. 297–303.23. Madeleine de Scudéry, Clélie: Histoire Romaine Première partie 1654, ed. Chantal Morlet-Chantalat(Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001), p. 177.

Left: François Chauveau. Carte deTendre. 1654.Below: The “Carte du pays deTendre” and an aerial photograph ofthe center of Amsterdam juxtaposed(Internationale Situationniste 3[December 1959], pp. 14–15).

“few know the map of that country [pays de Tendre]” and Herminius insists that it nev-ertheless is “a journey that many wish to make, and who deserve to know the routeleading to so admirable a place,” “a country of which no one has yet made theplan.”24 Clélie obligingly offers to provide one; thus the Carte de Tendre, which DeJeancalls “an emotional topography.” The map shows a landscape in sharp oblique per-spective, in which the three routes lead to three different sites of “Tender,” each on ariver. To the west, the route to “Tender on Gratitude” (Reconnaissance) passesthrough Kindness, Little Attentions, Assiduity, Willingness, Great Services, Sensibility,Tenderness, Obedience, Constant Friendship; losing one’s way might mean fallinginto Negligence, Inequality, Coolness, Lightness, and Forgetfulness, only to find one-self confronted by placid Lake Indifference. To the East, the way to “Tender onEstime” means surviving Great Effort, Galant Letter, Love Letter, Sincerity, BigHeartedness, Probity, Generosity, Exactitude, Respect, and Benevolence; failure leadsthrough Pride, Indiscretion, Perfidiousness, Slandermongering, and Maliciousnessbefore arriving at the stormy Sea of Emnity. Finally, the direct route to “Tender onInclination” passes through the town to the Dangerous Sea; beyond lies the unmap-pable Unknown Lands. In the assessment of Jeffrey Peters, the Carte

borrows all of its basic visual features from a language of contemporane-ous cartographic practice: the textured shading of the coastlines, thestandardized depiction of trees and forests, the general layout of thetowns and the place names that describe them, and even the legendprinted in the lower right-hand corner with the units of distancedescribed as lieues d’amitié [Miles of Friendship]. But the “Carte deTendre” maps time as well as space; it measures quality as well as quanti-ty; and distances are charted not in terms of movement through realtopography, but in terms of emotional or affective intensity. Placenames correspond not to physical sites, but to activities, procedures, andstates of mind.25

On one level, this little spatial diversion from the narrative of the novelacted as a center of conversation, but on another, it took up the cartographic con-ventions of the time and transformed them in such a way as to construct anideological map, what DeJean calls a proto-feminine utopia, a polemic against therationalist cogito, a veritable no-man’s-land. It also became the object of extremecriticism if not ridicule, with others claiming primacy for having invented itsforms, as well as an object of imitation, not only in the seventeenth and eigh-teenth centuries, but through to the present day as its narrative and spatialstructures have been adopted for novels and movies. An elaborate conversationpiece that helped structure the rather picaresque form of Clélie over its ten vol-umes, it was also a proto-board game of strategy and chance, positioning, as Peters

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24. Ibid., pp. 178–80.25. Peters, Mapping Discord, p. 84.

notes, not only sites of love but also “sites of power.”26 Its dangerous paths, more-over, led inexorably to those Terres Inconnues, which are only approachable afterfinding the new Northwest Passage sought by Debord.27

For these reasons alone, Debord, whose fascination with games was not con-fined to the pleasure principle anthropology of Huizinga, but was elaborated inthe invention of his own war game, or Kriegspiel, would have been attracted to theCarte de Tendre, a map he would have known from his school curriculum. AndMémoires attests to his enthusiasm for mapping the “game of love.” But the precieuxmovement that was embodied in the de Scudéry circle signified a deeper alle-giance based on Debord’s belief in its fundamentally disruptive and seditiousplace in the history of seventeenth-century ideas. In an article written with GilWolman for Potlatch 22, Debord compares the “precieux” movement with a num-ber of antiformalist struggles, and then to Lettrism itself:

Thus the “precieux” movement, so long concealed by the scholarly liesof the seventeenth century. Even though the forms of expression that itinvented have become as strange as possible to us, it threatens to berecognized as the principal current of ideas of the Grand Century, asour felt need for a constructive overturning of all aspects of life findscommon ground with the principal contribution of Preciosity in behav-ior and in décor (conversation, the promenade as privileged activitiesin architecture, the differentiation of the rooms of the dwelling, achange in the principles of decoration and furnishing).28

Here, Preciosity is given credit for having overturned the spatial structures of life,from within, so to speak, with the circles, salons, and conversation groups havingreformulated the interior of the house, its décor, and the relations betweenrooms, and, above all, for a theorist of the urban dérive, in characterizing the prom-enade as the central architectural activity.

In this context, the juxtaposition of the Carte de Tendre with the aerial photo-graph of Amsterdam—the selected “experimental zone” to be “systematicallyexplored by the Situationist teams” in a dérive planned for April–May 1960—implies not only that Amsterdam is considered a realm of the passions and a site ofheroic passages along waterways that resemble those of the realm of Tenderness,but also that such an action will in some sense “return” the city to a counter-urbaniststate, one closer to the desires of the Precieuses than of Descartes.

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26. Peters, Mapping Discord, p. 93. See also DeJean, “1654,” p. 301: “Scudéry’s map is an ancestor ofboard games such as Monopoly, and it was just as successful in its day: at least fifteen imitations andparodies appeared in the next decade to capitalize on the success of the game of love.”27. While Lola Montès was only compared to the Carte de Tendre, the map also inspired many otherfilms, including most notably Louis Malle’s Les amants of 1958 (I am indebted to Tom Conley for thisreference). The filmic implications of the Carte have been explored by Giuliana Bruno in Atlas ofEmotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (London: Verso, 2002), pp. 223–45.28. Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, “Pourquoi le Lettrisme?” Potlatch 22 (September 9, 1955), p. 99.

More directly, the effect of the Carte is manifested in the collage map ofParis constructed by Debord in 1956 under the title Guide psychogéographique deParis and published in Denmark by Jorn in the series of the new “BauhausImaginiste.” Vincent Kaufmann has termed it “another Carte de Tendre (or more pre-cisely the first one),” and pointed to the subtitle of the map: “Discourse on thePassions of Love.”29 This, of course, joins the map as a symbolic return to the cele-brated essay, attributed to Pascal and probably written between 1753 and 1754,also entitled Discours sur les passions de l’amour.30 The distinction drawn by Pascalbetween geometrical and subtle minds, and those driven by ambition or by love,as well as his conclusion that youth should be driven by both love and finesse wasevidently appealing to Debord, as was the idea of constructing his own version ofthe Carte de Tendre, delineating not the rivers toward Tenderness, but the “psycho-geographic slopes” traced by the urban dériveurs as they sought to define hithertounknown territories according to the sense of their ambient unity.

Even more intriguing was the choice of the map of Paris, the pieces ofwhich formed the collage. Unlike the contemporary map “Naked City,” which wascreated from the standard map of Paris divided into arrondissements, the GuidePsychogéographique selected a bird’s-eye view meticulously drawn by G. Peltier andpublished by Blondel la Rougery in 1951. Consciously modeled on the cele-brated Turgot map of Paris (1739), it showed the city in perspective, at an angleroughly equal to the point of view established for the Carte de Tendre. Thisoblique view, as opposed to the geometrical survey of the map, offered a sense

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29. Vincent Kaufmann, Guy Debord: La révolution au service de la poésie (Paris: Fayard, 2001), p. 160.30. Blaise Pascal (attrib.), Discours sur les passions de l’amour (1652–53), ed. S. Pestel, electronic collec-tion of the Bibliothèque Municipale de Lisieux (27.X.1999), on the basis of the edition edited byJacques Haumont (Paris, 1940), http://www.bmlisieux.com.

G. Peltier. Plan de Paris à vold’oiseau (detail). 1951.

of place, space, and buildings analogous to the aerial photograph, creating for theviewer an imaginary entry into the urban fabric. As Paul Chombart de Lauwe wrotein the technical notes to his sociological study Paris et l’agglomeration Parisienne:

Oblique photos allow one to have views of the same sector taken from dif-ferent sides. They provide, further, views plunging onto the facades ofhouses, and into the interior of courtyards, which are indispensable forsociological studies. They should be used at once as rough documents, aswell as to execute drawings facilitating their comprehension. These pho-tos should be taken for preference at an angle of 50 degrees, or even from60 or 70 degrees. Sometimes it is interesting to vary this angle to observedifferent details.31

Aerial Geography

Chombart de Lauwe, a geographer and ethnologist at the CNRS, attached tothe Musée de l’Homme, crossed the Sahara in a tourist plane to aid the missionéthnographique of Griaule in 1936; he was dubbed le pilote éthnographe, as he fought inthe Free French Army from 1942–45.32 Writing in 1948 in his edited volume Ladécouverte aérienne du monde, Chombart claimed “La vision aérienne du monde” asthe vision of modernity.33 In the same volume Michel Parent, Conservateur duMusée des plans en relief, wrote on “L’utilisation de la photographie aérienne parl’urbaniste,” both as a tool to criticize Haussmannization, and as a way to celebratethe three-dimensional modernity of Le Corbusier’s projects for La Porte Maillot, aswell as the visionary perspective of Le Corbusier, whose spatial slogans and represen-tations, he notes, are derived from aerial photography.34 “The aerial view of thecenter of Paris,” wrote Parent, “demonstrates to what extent Haussmann was led todisembowel the old quarters, to sometimes denature sites that the centuries hadpatiently harmonized.”35 This did not prevent him from eulogizing the projects ofLe Corbusier, who had succeeded, he claimed, in realizing the perfect intersectionof the “aerial vision and three-dimensional urbanism,” as contrasted to what hecalled “mole urbanism,” the view from too close to the ground:

Le Corbusier, great visionary of architecture and of future urbanism, hasfor the last twenty years oriented us to such research. All his slogans, onthe architecture of three dimensions, the synthesis of the major arts, are

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31. Paul-Henri Chombart de Lauwe, Paris et l’agglomération Parisienne, vol. 2, “Méthodes de recherchespour l’étude d’une grande cité” (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952), p. 9. 32. Emmanuel de Martonne, Géographie aérienne (Paris, 1948), p. 15.33. Paul-Henri Chombart de Lauwe, ed., La découverte aérienne du monde (Paris: Horizons de France,1948), pp. 19–56.34. Michel Parent,“L’utilisation de la photographie aérienne par l’urbaniste,” in de Lauwe, Ladécouverte aérienne du monde, pp. 316–26.35. Ibid., p. 316.

expressed in drawings derived from aerial photography. From the ter-races of the great administrative blocks to come, aerial vision is calledupon to become the everyday vision of the city, and whatever one says,this vision is by no means despondent.36

Two years later, Chombart produced a technical manual on Photographies aériennesthat would, he claimed, lead to a new understanding of “the study of man on theearth,” of human geography, ethnology, and archaeology, as well as urban sociologyand planning.37 Accompanied by a detailed case study of the village of Urt in thesouthwest of France, which analyzed the relations between Basque and Gascongneinhabitants through their spatial traces, Chombart systematically studies the methodsof local and regional aerial surveys and the interpretation of photographs of allscales. But he is most concerned with the different technologies and geometries ofvision appropriate to each specialization—special filters, colored screens, fast films,infra-red views, and, above all, different angles of view. A careful exposition of angles,flight patterns, and the distortions produced on irregular terrain is followed by a geo-metrical analysis of correction techniques and stereoscopic views in order to servethe needs of different disciplines.

Turning from the territory as a whole to the city of Paris, Chombart, in a workthat greatly influenced the Situationists after 1958, found that one of the best formsof documentation not only of the physical milieu, but also of social processes, was theaerial survey:

In the study of social space, an important part of its explication is linkedto aerial views and graphic documentation. The aerial survey andresearch by comparative maps allows, not only the representation of thesocial space, but also the study of certain processes.38

For Chombart, the aerial view of a city is the only means of developing a syntheticvision of its social space—l’espace social—which is the theme of the first part of hisParis study, a work influenced strongly by Maurice Halbwachs. Thus Le Corbusier’sPlan Voisin for Paris is admirable, “however exaggerated it has been from certainpoints of view,” and it opens up a “true debate” over planning, especially as it takesaccount of the value of the “essential symbolic monuments” of the city and theiraccessibility to the whole population. Chombart, much to the disgust of Debord, willcontinue his interest in Le Corbusier by researching the housing projects and theirsocial results in the built Unités d’habitation after 1949.

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36. Ibid., p. 325.37. Paul-Henri Chombart de Lauwe, Photographies aériennes: Méthode—Procédés—Interprétation: L’étudede l’homme sur la terre (Paris: Armand Colin, 1951).38. Chombart de Lauwe, Paris et l’agglomération parisienne, vol. 2, p. 5. In his bibliography Chombartcites Le Corbusier’s article “L’habitation moderne,” in Population (Paris, 1948), as well as La VilleRadieuse (Boulogne-sur-Seine: Éditions de l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, 1935) and Destin de Paris(Paris: Sorlot, 1941).

Although Chombart’s espousal of Le Corbusier’s plans for Paris, and his idealistvision of a social science that will lead to social harmony, would seem to make himthe perfect enemy of Situationism, Debord’s utilization of his work seems less opposi-tional than incorporative. Thus The Naked City map, as Tom McDonough haspointed out, relies on Chombart’s delineation of residential units in the 12thArrondissement, a map that identifies different social sectors and their linkages witharrows.39 Debord will also republish Chombart’s study of “all the journeys made inone year by a student living in the 16th Arrondissement,” which demonstrates thelimited lived domain of an inhabitant. As a way of charting a “unity of ambience,”such a map held great potential for the dérive and was used to illustrate the psycho-geographic exploration of Venice by Ralph Rumney.40 Indeed, in the same yearDebord would go so far as to credit Chombart with the perception that an urbanneighborhood is defined by more than the sum of its geographical and economic fac-tors, but also “by the image that its inhabitants and those of other neighborhoodshave of it.” Data of this kind, noted Debord, were “examples of a modern poetrycapable of provoking sharp emotional reactions.”41 Such an acknowledgment, whichincluded a nod to the Chicago school of urban sociology, recognized the value oftechnique beyond its original purpose, and was at odds with Raoul Vaneigem’s latercastigation of all professional idealism in sociology.42

Beginning in the late 1950s, in the pages of the Internationale Situationniste,Debord will utilize the aerial photograph only sparingly, in a move that at once worksas a détournement of professional sociology—notably that of Chombart—in order tocritique contemporary planning and consumer trends, and at the same time as aplanning device for future dérives. Ivan Chtcheglov’s article “Formula for a NewUrbanism,” printed in homage to a friend who had long been excluded from the SI,was illustrated with a composite aerial photograph of the southeast of Paris that wasstill marked by the numbers of the sectors in which it had been photographed;against this vision of a field for Situationist action, a photograph of Milwaukee sta-dium with its eighteen baseball players and 43,000 spectators, dwarfed by theadjacent parking lot filled with empty cars (IS, June 4, 1960), is intended to demon-strate the empty consumption of leisure.

After 1960, only two aerial photographs appear, however; this indicates arenewed concentration by the Situationists on détournement of images from the press,

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39. McDonough, Guy Debord, pp. 250–51. Published in Chombart de Lauwe, Paris, vol. 1, pp. 60–61,this survey of the Wattignies district was undertaken by his collaborator Louis Couvreur. Sadler, in TheSituationist City, p. 84, draws an obvious distinction between Chombart’s map and that of The Naked Citybut fails to recognize the importance of the procedure of social remapping championed by Chombartand Debord’s détournement, which also involves assimilation.40. Internationale Situationniste 1 ( June 1958), p. 28. 41. Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” in Liero Andreotti and Xavier Costa, eds., Theory of theDérive and Other Situationist Writings on the City (Barcelona: Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona,1996), p. 22. The original article, “Théorie de la dérive,” was published in Les Lèvres Nues 8 (1956) andreprinted in Internationale Situationniste 2 (December 1958), pp. 19–23.42. See Raoul Vaneigem, “Commentaires contre l’urbanisme,” Internationale Situationniste 6 (August1961), p. 33, where he holds Chombart complicit in provoking the social malaise and unrest associatedwith modern planning.

increasingly of the Vietnam War, and of the abandonment of the aesthetics and psy-chology of the dérive in favor of the political analysis of the spectacle, and thereporting on the more direct “critique de l’urbanisme,” marked by the riots inDetroit and Los Angeles.43 The two aerials that were published are significant inpointing to this increased sense of political urgency. The first “illustrates” anannouncement of the upcoming Fourth Conference of the International Situationistin London, planned for September 1960, and shows a B-52 Bomber photographedfrom above, dropping its bombs on an unspecified city.44 The second reproduces a“thermonuclear map” constructed by the artist J. V. Martin, in a series of “cartogra-phies” made out of Pop art images, and representing different regions of the worldduring a third World War (or what the SI termed the Third World War). Entitled“Europe four hours after the beginning of the third world war,” it shows a map ofEurope made up of a collage of charred paper in relief, an image of a burned-outand destroyed world.45 This series of maps was joined with a reconstruction of anuclear fallout shelter, in a manifesto protesting the Danish government’s construc-tion of a secret shelter.

Not incidentally, the SI had already published a long, ironic, but deadly serious,critique of the fallout shelter program in the U.S. under the telling title “Geopoliticsof Hibernation,” a bitter satire that accused the U.S. government of indulging in thepolitics of fear in order to sell two houses and not just one to the population—oneabove ground, and one below. The article was illustrated with no fewer than eightmarketing catalog images of shelters, showing everyday life continuing uninter-rupted below ground, even as the nuclear attack raged overhead. Advertising sloganssuch as “Man’s First and Last Thought . . . SURVIVAL!” spoke for themselves, as didthe hardly encouraging names for the shelters, “Peace O’Mind Shelter,” “Fox HoleShelter,” and “Bee Safe.”

With the imminent threat of nuclear war, the aerial photograph took on newimplications; once a guide to a peaceful psychographic dérive, it was now a threaten-ing image of death from the skies. Le Corbusier had noted thirty years before in hiseulogy of the airplane and its beneficent role in planning: “the bird can be dove orhawk. It became a hawk. What an unexpected gift to be able to set off at night undercover of darkness, and away to sow death with bombs upon sleeping towns . . . to beable to come from above with a machine gun at the beak’s tip spitting death fanwiseon men crouched in holes.”46 In such a context, the SI preferred to prepare for upris-ings on the ground.

But Debord himself hardly relinquished his affection for the aerial view as arecord of a city already transformed beyond recognition, and perhaps made morepiquant—as in the passages of Aragon’s Paysan de Paris—by the thought of its

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43. See, for example, the image of the burning supermarket in Los Angeles, August 1965, repro-duced from Le Monde in Internationale Situationniste 10 (March 1966), p. 5.44. Internationale Situationniste 4 (June 1960), p. 12.45. Internationale Situationniste 9 (August 1964), p. 32.46. Le Corbusier, Aircraft (London: The Studio, 1935), pp. 8–9.

ultimate demise. Aerial shots occur again and again in Debord’s films, sometimes asstills, sometimes as simulated flights over the city, panning over the stills, whichbecame memory devices, even as the Paris of the early 1950s, site of the first deliriousdérives, changed rapidly into an unknown and alien territory—a change that, Debordlaments, echoing Baudelaire, was more rapid than that of the human heart. WhereSur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (1959) pre-ferred to work with stills of Les Halles and the surrounding streets, beginning withCritique de la séparation (1961), the aerial view is inserted almost insistently; the Placede la Concorde, viewed from a helicopter, the view of the Seine, the panned view ofthe center of Paris, the Quai d’Orléans, and the island of Cygnes are interspersedwith photographs of the Situationists themselves in their cafés, and cut by images ofpast and present wars.47 The aerial view will return obsessively in Debord’s final filmIn girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, a palindrome which returns on itself in self-consumption; in this film, the Paris of the 1950s is viewed from above, zoomed into,and framed with tender care by a camera that pans across aerial photo stills, an inces-sant “series of different aerial photographs of Paris” traversed in movement.48 Thenostalgia that runs through even Debord’s earliest appeals for a unitary urbanism willbe, with the publication of the two volumes of Panegyric, transfixed in the image ofold Paris; aerial photographs now become still lifes of a city suspended in time, evenas the photographs of Atget were haunted by absence, triggering a memory of a pastthat would never be quite the same.

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47. Guy Debord, Oeuvres cinématographiques complètes 1952–1978 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), pp. 45–61.48. Ibid., p. 222.

Left: J. V. Martin. “Europe four hours after the beginning of the third world war,” cartographiethermonucléaire, June 1963 (Internationale Situationniste 9 [August 1964], p. 32).Right: Fallout shelter advertisement (Internationale Situationniste 7 [April 1962], p. 4).

Photo-Urbanism

Taken together, the “geography lessons,” the panned shots of aerial views, thecollaged maps of psychogeographic Paris, the shots of Situationists in their haunts,the views of old Paris, the fragments of social science maps, and the news shots ofuprisings, demonstrations, and police actions, all of them mingled in the films andpages of texts such as Mémoires, can be seen to add up to a more or less coherent sen-sibility. On the evidence of such documents, some critics have even seen what mightbe called a “Situationist City” emerging as a locus of counterurban thought and prac-tice. But however tempting the idea of a unitary Situationism might be, there remaindistinct differences between the various urban critiques of Chtcheglov, Wolman,Constant, Vanegein, and Debord himself. In the case of Wolman and Constant, ofcourse, this was a partial cause of their exclusion from the group. For Chtcheglov,while excluding him for reasons of mental health, Debord still harbored a sympathy,evinced in Mémoires and represented by the republication of the article “Formula fora Unitary Urbanism” in the IS. Yet, despite the obvious shifts in Debord’s thought—the transformation of the psychological into the political, of the dérive into theanalysis of the spectacle—there is a fundamental continuity and coherence frombeginning to end in his own work on the city.

Grounded in the fundamentals of geography—the emblem of which is pro-vided in Mémoires in the form of a (schoolbook) map of features withouthabitation—and developed through the active exploration of mapped collages andphotographic and sociological evidence, Debord’s unitary urbanism is consistent inits devotion to mental/psychical action in the city. Such a practice underpins thepotential for new experience, but it also develops the strategy for the war game ofoverturning present conditions. In this sense the aerial photograph, like the Carte deTendre, operates as a game board—a Kriegspiel detached from everyday reality onwhich one could plan future moves, as well as remember those of the past. Here theapparent detachment of the aerial image from life on the ground is revealed to beno more than a moment in the continuity between the telescopic and the close-upview. In looking, with Debord, at the illustrations to Panégyrique and through the lensof In girum imus nocte, we are reminded of a similar oscillation between earth and skyexperienced by another “Pascal,” the subject of Albert Lamorisse’s Ballon Rouge(1956) as he finally ascends over Paris on the strings of the community of balloons;Lamorisse, we also remember, was the inventor of a special kind of movie shot from ahelicopter, as well as a strategy game, called La conquête du monde (1957), later to besold in the U.S. as Risk.

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